"If the corporate culture is so infected with problems that they have not yet been solved and if they are selling a product that is suspect on its face, then maybe society is better off if Peregrine Systems is laid to rest." So wrote Penn State ethics professor J Edward Katz last December, in one of the most damning judgments ever passed on a software company.

With its 3G data network all dressed up and with nowhere to go, Verizon is courting PC notebook OEMs and cutting prices. Today it announced deals to embed CDMA EV-DO chips with the top three US PC manufacturers, Dell, Lenovo and HP, in their notebook PCs. Verizon's monthly tariff falls to $60 - half what European business users pay for their 3G data.

Scientists at London University's Imperial College have gained a new insight into the earliest days of our solar system through a new analysis of some of the oldest, most primitive, metorites found on Earth.

Intel is working on a version of its 65nm chip fabrication process that will produce processors with even lower power consumption characteristics. The chip giant says he technology will reduce transistor leakage by a factor of 1000.

Security watchers are reporting a surge of phishing attacks targeting European banks. Phishing attacks against over two dozen European banks were detected by security firm Websense last weekend (17-18 September).

Privacy chiefs from 40 countries have called upon the United Nations to prepare a legally binding instrument which clearly sets out in detail the rights to data protection and privacy as enforceable human rights.

Enterprising UK student Alex Tew has sold enough pixels to fund his way through university. Tew, 21, decided to flog pixels for a buck on his Million Dollar Homepage as part of a cunning scheme to raise cash.

The European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes has said she won't be waiting for the outcome of Microsoft's appeal against the original anti-trust charges before she decides whether or not to start another law suit against the firm.

LettersLots to get through this week, so where better to start than with a story of a star-crossed lover (can you have just one?) who thought he'd met his match online. But, as they exchanged love notes, it became increasingly apparent that it was not true love at all, but a scam designed to do nothing other than extract large amounts of cash from our protagonist:

Our recent article on Google Earth blowing military secrets to the forces of darkness provoked a huge response - much of it from eagle-eyed readers who obviously have nothing better to do than spend all day peering at the earth's surface for eye-catching hardware and installations.

Oracle’s acquisition of Siebel is a done deal as far as the delegates to OracleWorld in San Francisco are concerned. In the closing event on the first day of the conference Charles Phillips, Oracle’s president, and George Shaheen, Siebel’s CEO, appeared together on stage in a show of solidarity.

Mailinator - the service that offers free, disposable email addresses for use in web registrations - has created a "real-time" spam map. The system receives around a million junk mail messages a day. By resolving the IP addresses of proxies1 used to distribute this junk mail (and plugging this data into Google maps) the people behind the service have created a map to show where spam is coming from. This map is created from data that gets updated every three minutes.